Hummingbird
by MGuerre
Summary: Bella (Helen) is a hybrid. The oldest of her kind, and was warned by her father to avoid crossing paths with vampires. She has followed her father's request, seeing the sense of keeping herself hidden, until she meets a young immortal named Edward Cullen, studying medicine in Baltimore in the 1960s.


Author's Note: No idea if this is going to develop. However, I like the idea of an older, jaded Bella falling for a young, emo Edward. At this point, Edward is still young enough that he could have naturally lived that long. He is feeling bitter towards his immortality, even though he doesn't truly understand the weight of it yet. Bella does. Every connection she has made, she has also lost. Lmk what you think. If it sucks, feel free to tell me. I don't own Twilight.

She was the worst at names. The figures around her seemed fleeting at best; she dug in her heels against the ever creeping passivity towards humanity. She was of them, yet the lure of isolation and self-pity was as strong as the tide. Her living amongst people, learning the stories of the goodness of mankind, small acts of heroism that went against all survival instincts that separated man from animal, was her self-imposed repatriation. Ending her eternity tickled at the back of her mind. She had seen it done once before, eons ago, when she was still a child, even by the standards of the cave-dwellers back then. However, he, the man she saw snuff himself out, was a different type of ageless being. And while she was of him too, her soft flesh favored the survival instincts of her human mother. Time and time again, when she fought herself to get closer to that final light, the larger part of herself shied away.

Her father taught her to follow war. He was a god of old, one who sustained himself on lifeblood. Red ran thick on the battlefield, flowing faster than any shaman could demand from the people. But her father was not a violent man, rather soft-spoken, just content of his role in the world, until he fell in love. The death of her mother drove him to his own demise, but not before he saw her to her maturity.

Nearly a myriaannum of following the drum, sometimes settling long enough to amass power in the trades of old, prostitution, slavery, and darker ventures, she found herself desperately seeking to reunite with mankind, feeling like she has been drifting above them emotionally for far too long.

World War Two brought her to the USSR, where she followed troops to Vietnam where she preyed in field hospitals, helping herself to the bodies before they fully cooled. There, she befriended a couple of Yanks enough to follow them back, ready to establish herself again, in a new place. And that's how she found herself boarding in a Baltimore fraternity house in 1964.

She once liked to return to familiar places. It left an ache when she realized that they stopped being familiar. When her ship docked in New York, she fled the city before even looking around, finding a reasonably middle-class widower to sweet talk into paying for the first Greyhound ticket out of the city. Baltimore she liked. Living in close quarters with a bunch of young men wasn't new, or exciting, but some of it was novel. Matthew, who she attached herself to when he was gassed late at night in a nicer pub in town, lived in the house. She spent that first night in his room, platonically, and made herself a fixture in the home before the boys even thought to question the ethics of a single woman living in an Animal House. She claimed a room near the kitchen, away from the main hive of activity, where the Help used to live. And she thrived in the city.

She was not one for the material; her nomadic lifestyle didn't lend itself to sentimentality. However, she paid herself a portion of dues set aside for liquor and with it clothed herself respectably and had pin money enough for an occasional treat. Blood did not flow in the city as it did on the battlefield, but she was not dependent on it as her father was. Like others of her kind, she could eat human food, though she did dip out of town on occasion to supplement the houses questionable creations with a fresh hunt. Not as satisfying as human blood, but a hunt, with only her teeth and nails against fang and claw, was much more pleasurable.

Helen's life was good.


End file.
